Agri-Environmental Evaluation of Cropping Systems

FRONTAL LESSONS

1. Introduction
1.1 Introduction of the course
1.2 Challenges of agriculture for a sustainable use of environmental resources and production factors
1.3 sustainability from theory to practice
1.4 how and why to measure the sustainability of agricultural systems

2. Agri-environmental evaluations
2.1 Possible approaches
2.2 Indicators: definition and utility

3. Agri-environmental balances of the cropping system
3.1 planning a balance and calculating indicators
3.2 identification and definition of the cropping system
3.3 identification and definition of the functional unit
3.4 time and space scales
3.5 target groups and stakeholders, thematic organization and reference values
3.6 setting a budget; data inventory; primary and secondary data; allocation criteria

4. Energy balance of the cropping system
4.1 Historical notes, from the ecological approach to the economic one
4.2 Importance of the energy balance
4.3 Direct and indirect inputs, energy equivalents, outputs and indicators
4.4 The emergy balance

5. Balance of greenhouse gas emissions in the cropping system
5.1 Greenhouse gas emissions and climate change
5.2 The role of agriculture between adaptation and mitigation
5.3 Emission metrics, from the radiative forcing to the Global Warming Potential
5.4 Direct and indirect emissions, estimation methods and emission factors
5.6 Methods for measuring greenhouse gas fluxes from the ground

6 The nutrient balance
6.1 Nutrient Use Efficiency
6.2 Nitrogen balance at farm scale
6.3 Nitrogen balance at field scale

7 Soil organic carbon
7.1 definition of soil organic carbon pools
7.2 organic carbon balance, a problem of methods and scale: apparent balance and field-scale models; models and remote sensing at biome scale
7.3 carbon management in cropping systems and strategies for climate change mitigation

PRACTICAL LESSONS
Development of group project for the analysis, evaluation and comparison of cropping systems characterized by different levels of input intensification.
The work will be carried out in the following stages:
- identification of objectives and organization of work
- designing and sharing a common work protocol
- analysis of a questionnaire from on-farm surveys
- analysis of bibliographic sources
- organization of data inventory
- setting of calculation methods and verification
- implementation of computation procedures and verification
- estimation of indicators
- organization of the results (preparation of graphs and tables) and their discussion
- preparation of a final presentation of the work for the final exam

The project will be organized in actions, with intermediate check points for evaluations and discussions. The work will be done mainly in Excel